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Source: Yes! Weekly (NC Triad)

Anyone who has ever been involved in grassroots organizing, a social movement or activism has probably wondered at least once, if not frequently, about if they are being watched. Though police surveillance is no secret — uniformed officers regularly videotape legal protests, for example — what happens with the intelligence is usually a mystery to the public.

Eventually the curiosity got to me, and I filed a request with the city for e-mail records with my name as the keyword. I’ve never been arrested, but I knew assumptions of surveillance weren’t just paranoia.

The results were disappointing — there was almost no information about police surveillance — so I kept digging. The department’s criminal intelligence work is shrouded in mystery, and the lack of transparency made me determined to see what else I could find.

In some cases, the documents were jarring — police infiltration of Occupy Greensboro, a council member reporting on activist meetings and a list of the surveillance successes at an anarchist conference in town.

This is a local story, but with national implications since it seems all our local police departments have their own little STASI wannabes wasting taxpayer resources looking for fake criminals while ignoring real crime.

I was involved in the Occupy movement in my area and am now quite sure I have a "file" with these idiots and will be subject to "scrutiny" in the future. The most aggravating aspect of this story is that a local politician used the Occupy movement to help get herself elected to the city council by sucking up to them, all the while she was ratting us out to the police.